“What are those things?” he asked.
“A medicine,” she said, “or a poison if people don’t know what to do with it.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Powder it, mix it with some other things, steep it in boiling water and give it to children who have worms.”
Doro shook his head. “I’d think you could help them more easily by making the medicine within your own body.”
“This will work just as well. I’m going to teach some of the women to make it.”
“Why?”
“So that they can heal themselves and their families without depending on what they see as my magic.”
He reached down and tipped her head up so that she faced him. “And why shouldn’t they depend on your magic? Your medicines are more efficient than any ground weed.”
She shrugged. “They should learn to help themselves.”
He picked up her basket and drew her to her feet. “Come into the house and talk with me.”
“There is nothing to say.”
“Come in anyway. Humor me.” He put his arm around her and walked her back to the house.
He started to take her into the library, but a group of the younger children were being taught to read there. They sat scattered in a half circle on the rug looking up at one of Anyanwu’s daughters. As Doro guided Anyanwu away from them, he could hear the voice of one of his sons by Susan reading a verse from the Bible: ” `Be of the same mine one toward another. Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate. Be not wise in your own conceits.’ ”
Doro glanced back. “That sounds as though it would be an unpopular scripture in this part of the country,” he said.
“I see to it that they learn some of the less popular ones,” Anyanwu answered. “There is another: ‘Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee.’ They live in a world that does not want them to hear such things.”
“You’re raising them as Christians, then?”
She shrugged. “Most of their parents are Christian. They want their children to read so they can read the Bible. Besides”?she glanced at him, the corners of her mouth turned down?“besides, this is a Christian country.”
He ignored her sarcasm, took her into the back parlor. “Christians consider it a great sin to take one’s own life,” he said.
“They consider it a sin to take any life, yet they kill and kill.”
“Anyanwu, why have you decided to die?” He would not have thought he could say the words so calmly. What would she think? That he did not care? Could she think that?
“It’s the only way I can leave you,” she said simply.
He digested that for a moment. “I thought staying with you now would help you get used to … to the things I have to do,” he said.
“Do you think I’m not used to them?”
“You haven’t accepted them. Why else should you want to die?”
“Because of what we have already said. Everything is temporary but you and me. You are all I have, perhaps all I would ever have.” She shook her head slowly. “And you are an obscenity.”
He frowned, staring at her. She had not said such things since their night together in the library. She had never said them this way, matter-of-factly, as though she were saying, “You are tall.” He found that he could not even manufacture anger against her.
“Shall I go away?” he asked.
“No. Stay with me. I need you here.”
“Even though I’m an obscenity.”
“Even so.”
She was as she had been after Luisa’s death?uncharacteristically passive, ready to die. Then it was loneliness and grief pressing on her, weighing her down then. Now … what was it now, really?
“Is it Susan?” he asked. “I didn’t think you had gotten that close to her.”
“I hadn’t. But you had. She gave you three children.”
“But …”
“You did not need her life.”
“There was no other way she could be of use to me. She had had enough children, and she could not care for them. What did you expect me to do with her?”
Anyanwu got up and walked out of the room.
Later, he tried to talk to her again. She would not listen. She would not argue with him or curse him. When he offered again to go, she asked him to stay. When he came to her room at night, she was strangely, quietly welcoming. And she was still planning to die. There was an obscenity. An immortal, a woman who could live
